IndyBlog

Retired judge to debate marijuana prohibitionist

Both supporters and opponents of pot have found enough in Colorado's first six months to declare the experiment both a roaring success and a flaming failure. And with the rest of the country watching developments for possible changes in their own laws, the noise is just getting louder.

“Colorado is demonstrating to the rest of the country that regulating marijuana works,” Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, told POLITICO a few days ago. It took four paragraphs for his opponents, lead by Kevin Sabet, to see the same data and declare the opposite.

“The creation of a new Big Tobacco-type industry has emerged in Colorado, along with multiple deaths, increased emergency room admissions, increased poison control center calls, and increased admissions to treatment," he said.

Sabet is with Project SAM, a funny group in that it seems to have been formed solely because nobody else was complaining about the wave of weed reformation in 2013. Its founder, Ted Kennedy's son, abused cocaine as a teenager, OxyContin as an adult, and once crashed into a barricade on Capitol Hill in a fucked-up state, all of which apparently inspired him to make noise about marijuana in the Rocky Mountains.

Anyway, Sabet will get the chance to further expose our doomed state in a debate tomorrow morning with retired judge James Gray, who's representing Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. It's happening at 10:45 a.m. at the Colorado School of Mines, but it will also be simulcast here.

"Although Judge Gray has championed many causes, none has been bolder than his work to combat the illegal-drug problem in America," reads his profile. "He has concluded that helping to repeal drug prohibition is the best and most lasting gift he could make to his country."